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Noisy unstructured text data is found in informal settings such as online chat, SMS, emails, message boards, newsgroups, blogs, wikis and web pages. Also, text produced by processing spontaneous speech, printed text, handwritten text contains processing noise. Text produced under such circumstances is typically highly noisy containing spelling errors, abbreviations, non-standard words, false starts, repetitions, missing punctuations, missing case information, pause filling words such as “um” and “uh.” Such text can be seen in large amounts in contact centers, on-line chat rooms, OCRed text documents, SMS corpus etc. The theme of the IJCAI 2007 Conference is 'AI and its benefits to society.' In keeping with this theme, this workshop proposes to look at text analytics of highly noisy text that is produced in such everyday applications in society.

Workshop Description and Objectives Noisy unstructured text data is found in informal settings such as online chat, SMS, emails, message boards, newsgroups, blogs, wikis and web pages. Also, text produced by processing spontaneous speech, printed text, handwritten text contains processing noise. Text produced under such circumstances is typically highly noisy containing spelling errors, abbreviations, non-standard words, false starts, repetitions, missing punctuations, missing case information, pause filling words such as ''um'' and ''uh.'' Such text can be seen in large amounts in contact centers, on-line chat rooms, OCRed text documents, SMS corpus etc. The theme of the IJCAI 2007 Conference is ''AI and its benefits to society.'' In keeping with this theme, this workshop proposes to look at text analytics of highly noisy text that is produced in such everyday applications in society. The goal of the workshop is to focus on the problems encountered in analyzing such noisy documents coming from various sources. The nature of the text warrants moving beyond traditional text analytics techniques. We hope that the workshop will allow researchers to present current research and development in addressing this challenge. We also believe that as a result of this workshop there will be sharing of real life noisy data sets and will result in their becoming available to a wider research community.

Topics We welcome original research papers that identify key problems related to noisy text analytics and offer solutions. We particularly encourage contributions that look at solving real life problems in the different settings where such data is produced in huge amounts. Potential topics include (but not limited to):

Participation We hope that the workshop will allow researchers working in areas related to unstructured data analytics, Natural Language Processing, Information Extraction, Information Retrieval, etc., to focus on the needs of users extracting useful information from noisy text. The target audience is a mixture of academia and industry researchers working with noisy text. We believe this work is of direct relevance to domains such as call centers, the world-wide web, and government organizations that need to analyze huge amounts of noisy data.

IAPR Endorsement This workshop is endorsed by the International Association for Pattern Recognition (http://www.iapr.org)

IAPR Best Student Paper Award IAPR is sponsoring the Best Student Paper Prize at AND 2007. One paper in which a student is the primary author (first author/presenter) will be selected for the IAPR Best Student Paper Award. The awardee will be nominated through the paper reviewing process and the final decision will be made during the workshop. The award carries a cash prize of $160 which will be given at the conclusion of the workshop.

Publication We are currently in negotiation with a leading publisher for the proceedings to be available onsite. We have also received tentative approval for a special issue of a journal for post-workshop publication of selected papers.